Classicverse 11 Facts About Don Blake
by Elspeth1
Summary: Series of drabbles about Don, set in Classic-verse.


Title: Classic-verse ficlet: 11 Facts About Don Blake  
Authors: **elspethdixon**  
Rating: G  
Pairings/Characters: Gen  
Beta: **seanchai**  
Warnings: None  
A/N: Set in Classic-verse, which is a modern reboot of the Avengers. See my profile for the other Classic-verse fics. This was supposed to be a series of drabbles, but I got carried away on the last couple.  
Summary: See title.  
Disclaimer: The characters and situations in this story belong to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics. No profit is being made off this fan-written work.

* * *

**11 facts about Don Blake:**

**1)** Don was born in winter, the Thursday before Christmas Eve, while his parents were spending the holidays with family in Nebraska.

There'd been a blizzard that night -- when his parents told the story, it was white drifts and softly falling snow like a fairytale Christmas, but according to his older cousins, the wind had howled like a lost soul, and his father had almost run off the road trying to drive his mother to the hospital.

They always went out to visit in the summer, when school was out, and Don got to be the cool kid, the cousin from New York, the one who'd seen all the latest movies and heard the latest music and went to a school that didn't have a student dress code still mired in the 1960s.

The best part of the whole vacation was always the thunderstorms. The air shook with thunder claps, and lightening lanced across the horizon between ground and sky, and he stood in the backyard with his face upturned so the rain could fall on it and wished for a tornado. There never was one.

* * *

**2)** He got a sense, once in a while, that someone was watching him, would look up to see black birds perched on a tree branch or the edge of a building. Crows and ravens followed him around. Once or twice, when he was a kid, he tried to throw stones at them, but they always managed to dodge at the last second.

* * *

**3)** Don was the star of his high school track and field team, before the car accident. Drunk driver running through a red light, and he woke up in the hospital with three pins in his leg. He went to his senior prom on crutches, and never jumped hurdles or threw shotput again.

He'd been good at it, though, better than anyone ever expected -- no one had thought a skinny kid just above average height would be able to throw that far, but the first time he held the heavy metal ball in his hand, it was as if something inside of him had been waiting for it, had always known how to do this. He'd broken the current varsity captain's record during try outs.

* * *

**4)** He was never much of a science fiction fan, but he had loved Star Wars from the first time he saw it as a kid, and felt almost as betrayed by the prequel trilogy as Tony did. He loved the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, too, and the Iliad, and the Odyssey; anything with an epic, sweeping scale to it. He read Beowulf in college, as part of his required History of Western Civilization course, and recognized the part where the dragon goes on a rampage over a goblet stolen from his horde immediately.

"Just like in the Hobbit," he observed, to several other students' sneers. When the professor agreed that it was, in fact, just like the way in which Bilbo had woken Smaug, and then added that Tolkien had been a language professor at Oxford and they were going to read an essay he'd written on Beowulf as part of their assigned reading for next class, Don didn't bother to hide his smugness.

He did hide the fact that he knew how to write in both Elvish script and Dwarven runes, though, knowing that explaining that he had been very, very bored stuck in the hospital while his leg healed wouldn't mitigate the immense geekiness of knowing how to write with imaginary letters.

Sometimes, when it had been a long day and he wanted to make the gorgeous nurse at the clinic that he still hadn't summoned up the courage to ask out for drinks yet smile, he signed his name to patients' charts in Sindarin. Jane pretended to be irritated, but he could tell that she thought it was funny.

* * *

**5)** It was the crutches that taught him how to be patient. He'd never had to wait for anything before, always been the wild kid, the loud one, but when you couldn't walk without a cane, you had to learn to trade fast and excited for slow and deliberate. It was that patience and methodicalness that got him into med school, but he resented the accident for years, anyway.

It wasn't until his first year of residency that he realized how lucky he'd been. The evening after a nine year old girl had died on the operating table, one of the hospital's neurosurgeons had driven his car off a bridge. Don was almost certain it was an accident. Almost. He thought the psych consult they'd called in was because of that, at first, but it turned out it was because the head of surgery didn't have the guts to deliver the "you're permanently crippled and your career is over" speech himself.

His leg had never stopped him from being a doctor. His eye sight, his hearing, his hands... those might have.

* * *

**6)** When he was a kid, he used to imagine, sometimes, that he was adopted -- that his parents weren't his real parents, that he was somebody special, the heir to a huge fortune, maybe, or the son of somebody famous. Usually when he was in trouble for something and had been sent to his room. He never actually wanted it to be true, though.

* * *

**7)** Things happened sometimes, when he got angry -- electrical equipment shorting out, the air pressure dropping. When he'd been doing his residency at Wellhaven, in New York City, med students had sworn that Stephen Strange could make the lights flicker with the sheer force of his contempt for you if you rubbed him the wrong way. The one time Don had gotten into an argument with him, an EEG machine had shorted out and started smoking.

Things were a lot calmer and more pleasant around the ER when people stopped calling Strange in for neuro and surgical consults. Don always felt bad for being relieved, but Strange had made the hair on his arms stand up. The way those ravens and crows did. The way lightning did.

* * *

**8)** In his first three months on the Avengers, Thor was mind controlled, poisoned, electrocuted, shot at with anti-tank missiles, and thrown through the wall of a skyscraper by one of the Masters of Evil. Don Blake showed up for his emergency room shift on time the next day in spite of it all, even after South America, when half of one eyebrow was burnt off and his entire body felt like it had been beaten with sticks. The head of the ER thought he was hung-over, until he saw the burns on his face.

Don told everyone that he'd been in a car accident, and didn't feel guilty for the lie until one of the nurses flinched and told him how lucky he was and he remembered three years ago, when the ambulance crew had brought Strange in unconscious on a backboard, and one of the nurses -- the same one, he was fairly sure -- had spent half an hour crying in a supply closet, despite the fact that Strange had always been an absolute bastard to her.

"Yes," he agreed, and thought about Tony's lips turning blue while his heart struggled to beat, while Don argued desperately with himself over whether he or Thor could help more, whether Thor ought to lay down the hammer and transform back into Don again. Half of him had been terrified that he was going to have to watch Tony die, watch as (_he choked to death on his own blood, an arrow through his lung_) Tony's heart stopped right in front of his eyes. "I was very lucky."

* * *

**9)** Twenty-eight was young for a doctor, young enough that patients occasionally looked at him and told him that they wanted to speak to a doctor instead of a nurse or resident, or asked when Dr. Blake would get there. For a superhero, though, it was practically old. Don was the same age as Reed Richards when the Avengers were formed, almost a decade older than most of the X-Men and years older than any other Avenger save for Hank, who was the next-oldest at twenty-six. He forgot it most of the time, because Cap and Tony in particular usually acted like they were years older than they were, but every now and then Jan would flirt with one of the others to make Hank jealous, or Cap would get into a petty argument with Clint that was supposedly about strategy but actually about whose dick was bigger, and Don would remember that he was dealing with a bunch of people who were all under twenty-five. It got annoying occasionally. Luckily, Thor was more patient then he was, probably because Fandral, Volstag, and Hogun had the collective maturity level of a trio of nineteen-year-old fraternity brothers, and compared to them, _anyone_ seemed grown up.

* * *

**10)** He wanted to be a sports doctor originally, to work in orthopedics and physical therapy, and help people who'd been through the same kind of thing he had get their mobility and their lives back. He changed his mind his junior year at Columbia, when the towers fell. He gave blood, and donated money to the Red Cross, but it wasn't enough -- he wanted to be able to offer real help, wished desperately that he were already done with medical school so that he could go offer emergency care at one of the city hospitals, but instead there was nothing he could do but watch the news and remind the out-of-state kids in his dorm to call their frantic parents.

Three days afterward, one of the freshmen knocked on his door in the middle of the night, nearly in tears, insisting that there was something wrong with his roommate and that the campus health people weren't open this late, and could Don please come and help.

The roommate was huddled in the corner of the room, eyes closed and his head down on his knees, clothes covered in dust, with bits of debris in his hair. "I can still hear them," he was whispering. "They sent me home when I couldn't hear people breathing anymore, when all the heartbeats stopped. They're all dead." He looked up then, eyes wide and blank, blue irises hazed over with milky scar tissue, and Don had realized abruptly that he was blind, or nearly so. "Foggy," he asked plaintively, "why can I still _hear_ them?"

"He came back, and he was just... like that." The freshman, Foggy, had stared at Don with enormous, miserable eyes, and added, "His dad died just a couple of weeks ago. I think maybe, everything that happened..."

Don had nodded, familiar by then with crying students and hysterical parents, and knowing from the state of the kid's clothes and hair that he'd been much closer to Ground Zero than anyone ought to have had to be. According to Foggy, he'd been missing for three days -- probably too in shock to come home. Someone should have taken him to an emergency room; instead, he'd apparently just been sent back to campus by someone or other, and Don had to stop himself from grinding his teeth when he reflected on how badly whomever that person had been had dropped the ball. He would have to make sure to do better than that, when he started practicing.

The two of them got the roommate calmed down, got him to take a shower and wash the concrete dust and god knew what else off, and a couple of hours later, when both freshmen were asleep and Don had gone back to his own room, it was with a quiet feeling of accomplishment; he'd been able to help one person, at least. When he started looking around for medical programs that spring, he focussed his search on schools that would train him in general practice or emergency medicine. No specialties -- he was going to work with everyone.

Now, he saw a far wider spectrum of patients than just kids with sports injuries or men and women recovering from broken bones or torn ligaments. Car crash victims, kids with the flu, pregnant women, routine check-ups, construction accidents, over-doses, screaming two year olds with ear infections... Between his shifts at the emergency room and his own private clinic hours, he could have filled all hours of the day even without the time he spent as Thor, and even when he had to cut back his availability for appointments in order to make time for his responsibilities as an Avengers, he still loved his job.

He was also one of the only people in New York City who knew who Daredevil was.

* * *

**11)** He wasn't sure who was the first person on the team to figure out the connection between Don Blake and Thor, but Don's money was on Tony.

As soon as the five Avengers had returned from Vespugia -- moments after the quinjet had landed, in fact -- Thor had announced his intention of going to 'fetch' Don Blake. He had waited a good half hour before showing up at the front gate of the Avengers Mansion, just in case the rest of the team was starting to get suspicious about how quickly Thor could always call him in when they needed him, and when Jarvis ushered him inside to take a look at Tony, there was already a half-empty glass by the other man's elbow and a slightly glazed look in his eyes.

Don confiscated it, informed him of exactly how idiotically stupid he was to drink alcohol so soon after nearly dying, before Don had had a chance to find out what was wrong with him, and then ordered him to strip off his shirt so that he could check for the cracked ribs he was already sure were there.

"The big guy told me all about it," Don told him, when Tony hesitated, and then he tried not to look too ghoulishly fascinated by the metal implant in the center of Tony's chest, with its softly glowing lights.

When he was done with his examination -- Tony did not, in fact have cracked ribs, merely badly bruised ones, and he seemed far healthier than someone who had only recently been on the verge of death had any right to be -- he looked up to find Tony staring at him, a lopsided smile on his face.

Tony reached out and ran one finger along the eyebrow the anti-tank missile had singed off, which was missing from Don's face as well even though Thor had been the one who'd been burned, because life was unfair like that. "You look like hell, Donner Blake," Tony said, in an odd, slightly dreamy tone that Don blamed on a combination of alcohol and exhaustion. "You should go home and rest."

Don carefully removed Tony's hand from his face, resisting the urge to rub at his eyebrow, which itched and stung like crazy now that he'd been reminded of it again. "It's Donald," he corrected, looking Tony straight in the eye. "Donner is one of Santa's reindeer."

"Right," Tony said, shrugging. "Of course. Donald. Now that you're satisfied I'm not dying, can I finish my drink?"

Tony never mentioned it again, not until after Thor's secret identity was public knowledge among the Avengers, but they both knew that he knew.

* * *


End file.
